When somebody runs for public office, they usually have several stump speeches that can be trouped out in front of the appropriate audience: “I’m very pro-labor” when the candidate’s standing in front of a manufacturing facility. “I believe government should be pro-business” when they’re standing in front of the Chamber of Commerce.

In recent years, I’ve heard Steve Wozniak speak numerous times and to me it seems he has at least 2 different stump speeches: “Technology is wonderful and is changing the world for the better” when talking at the Computer History Museum. “Steve Jobs made a lot of money off of things I invented” when talking in front of engineers at DAC, or a bunch of well-heeled suburbanites as he did this week at the San Mateo Performing Arts Center on Wednesday night.

The Steve Jobs bit probably plays well in front of engineers who often feel under-appreciated, or sense that Sales & Marketing makes more than their share of the winnings from intellectual property developed and refined by Design & Engineering. The Steve Jobs bit may not play so well, however, in front of mid-Peninsula suburbanites who drive late-model BMWs, Mercedes and the odd Tesla here and there, never chew with their mouths open, and passionately want their children to behave, excel on their SATs, and go to Ivy League schools. These people believe in Steve Jobs – they all carry iPhones and, more importantly, all believe in the money they’ve earned by investing in Apple here in the new millennium.

Wozniak is an interesting speaker – almost frenetic – and from the get-go offered his 1500+ person audience on December 4th a stream-of-consciousness data dump that started by explaining that geeks such as himself who are shy and weird have different definitions of fun, that he’s moving to Australia, and that he had 8 vials of blood drawn for a health exam this week, but had trouble producing a urine sample. He also let us know that his past hi-jinx have included the use of good printers to produce fake IDs, $2 bills that are valid currency, and small stickers for airplane bathrooms that say, “Do not Flush over Cities.”

We learned that in his youth Woz got late-night access to the IBM 360 at De Anza College by getting somebody to duplicate the security key for him, and that the grades you get in school are never a reflection of your knowledge – just a reflection of how much rote learning you’ve mastered, so you can regurgitate it on exams.

Woz told us he met Steve Jobs in high school – hard to understand, as Wozniak was born in 1950 and Jobs in 1955 – and that the two of them repeatedly made money off of things that Woz had invented. They also did a lot of cool hi-jinx stuff together, including unfurling a big banner over the wall of the high school to welcome parents to graduation that included an oversized rendering of the internationally recognized symbol of the middle finger.

We learned that Wozniak was a huge Bob Dylan fan, that Jobs merely liked to listen to pleasant music and ergo liked the Beatles, and that “the movies get it all wrong” with regards to who liked what and when – those “movies” being the current spate of biopics lionizing the mythology of Steve Jobs.

Woz told us, “I had a strong ethical background” and hence did not like student debt, so before each academic year at U.C. Berkeley, he spent a year earning the money to pay his tuition. While he was enrolled at Berkeley, however, the hi-jinx continued including bringing cherry bombs into his dorm on campus, because “naughty minds are creative minds [whereas] academics train you to [stay] on a track. Free thinking, however, allows you to go off the rails.”

We heard about the famous beeping box that Wozniak invented that allowed him and his pal Jobs to make endless phone calls by gaming the pay-phone systems of the day. They “bamboozled” lots of phone systems – and phone system employees – and then Wozniak got hired at Atari, where “Steve Jobs was never a designer of hardware or software.”

Nonetheless, Atari suggested to Jobs that if he could produce a more efficient chip-set design in just 4 days, they’d pay cold hard cash. When Jobs proposed to Wozniak that he do the design to earn said cash for the both of them, Woz lamented that the assignment would take months, not days, but Jobs insisted.

So after 4 sleepless days and nights, Woz produced the winning design and Jobs took payment on the deliverable from Atari. Jobs paid Woz half of the reported $700 reward – in other words, $350 – but 12 years later, a then-employee of Wozniak’s read Jobs’ autobiography and let Woz know that the Atari reward 12 years earlier had actually been thousands of dollars, not hundreds.

In and around this infamous anecdote, we learned that Steve Jobs’ sister Patty was, at one point in her life, short on cash and asked her brother to give her a computer for free. Jobs refused, so Wozniak coughed up some money, bought the computer and gave it to Patty.

We also learned that early in his career, Wozniak became deeply involved in the Homebrew Computer Club based in Silicon Valley during which time he designed his own terminal that predated everything Internet. Even the Arpanet, per Woz, was only in its infancy, so his invention was a thing of wonder. More importantly, his motivations were pure: “I wanted little geeks [like me] to feel empowered, important, and masters of their own fate. I wanted to supply the social [nutrient to help them connect with others.]”

Again setting the record straight, it was Wozniak who first took Steve Jobs to the Homebrew Computer Club, not vice versa as is claimed in those darn movies. In those first 5 years when they were hanging out together, per Woz, “We took my ideas [again and again] and turned them into money.”

Then Woz gave an abbreviated history of Apple. Here’s my CliffNotes version of his version: The Mac was weak, but the Apple I and Apple II were not.

In conclusion, Woz told us that “engineers like functionality” and Wozniak is an engineer. “Apple [on the other hand] likes style.”

And finally, “Steve Jobs was always embarrassed that he didn’t understand the technology.”

During Q&A after he was done with his formal presentation, Woz was asked why he is moving to Australia. He said he could have moved somewhere cool like New Zealand, but he got an email from someone in Australia asking him to move there, so he decided on that instead.

]]>http://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/ipshowcase/?feed=rss2&p=10681Marvell’s Weili Dai: articulating Entrepreneurship at IEDMhttp://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/ipshowcase/?p=475
http://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/ipshowcase/?p=475#commentsFri, 04 Jan 2013 04:54:45 +0000http://www10.edacafe.com/blogs/ipshowcase/?p=475For the first time ever, organizers of the International Electron Devices Meeting honored a member of their community by providing a platform for conversation about translating innovation into business success. The premier event on December 12th in San Francisco featured an hour-long, on-stage, lunch-time interview with Marvell Technology Group VP and GM of Communications and Consumer Business Weili Dai.

Ms. Dai co-founded Marvell in 1995 with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, and his brother, Pantas Sutardja. Together they have built an organization which now stands as the fifth largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, one with 7000 employees and an international clientele. If you wanted to know more about Marvell, the information’s out there in spades. If you wanted to know more about the personal story behind Marvell, however, you should have been at the IEDM Entrepreneurs Lunch on December 12th. Ms. Dai gave a compelling interview that day, providing as succinct a summary of what it takes to start and build a company as one could ever hope to hear.

The highlight was a description of how, with babe in arms, she was in the audience at the Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus watching her husband receive his PhD in EECS several decades ago. Now today, that child is himself a PhD candidate in the same school where his father earned a PhD and his mother a BS in Computer Science. Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai have a younger son, as well, who is currently an undergraduate at Cal, also in the School of Engineering.

Keeping it even more in the family, this past May, Weili Dai delivered the U.C. Berkeley School of Engineering Commencement Address in the Greek Theater – astonishingly, the first woman ever to give that speech in the history of the school.

It was clear at IEDM that Weili Dai had a remarkable story to tell, one that was totally relevant to a venue such as the Entrepreneurs Lunch, and not just because of the facts. But because of the resounding message that Weili Dai brought to her narrative: A message of energy, positive thinking, a disciplined lifestyle, and most importantly, a willingness to change course when business and/or economic conditions require it.

Ms. Dai’s message also included an admonition that a successful enterprise must be willing to let employees try out new idea within the company. Along those lines, Dai insisted she would much rather hire an out-of-the-box thinker who might not have a conventional CV, because with that individual an organization gets someone who looks at solutions to problems – both technical and business – from an unconventional point of view, often coming up with answers that elude most, but are just the right fix for many a dilemma.

Towards the end of the hour, when questions were taken from the floor, I asked Ms. Dai if there were two or three things she and her family’s company might have done differently. She noted that better planning at various stages would have helped prepare for the inevitable surprises of doing business.

She also said that, although initially she believed simply doing your best for the customer would guarantee success, she eventually learned that pursuing excellence wasn’t all that was needed. In fact, companies such as Marvell also needed to keep an eye on the competitive landscape and realize that pragmatic thinking is often as important as idealistic thinking, and more important than she had originally believed.

Hers was a complex and nuanced answer, and precipitated additional thoughtful give-and-take with her audience and a fine conclusion to a remarkable hour. Kudos to IEDM for hosting the conversation on December 12th, and more importantly, for inaugurating an event that promises to add to the complexity of the annual confab going forward.

*********************Sutardja Dai Hall …

Adding gravitas, after the fact, to Ms. Dai’s interview at IEDM on December 12th, the following day the 65th birthday party for Prof. Chenming Hu was held in the recently-debuted Sutardja Dai Hall on the campus of U.C. Berkeley.

The building’s name acknowledges the $20 million gift that the Sutardja Dai family made to the university to help fund the construction. That donation reflects the family’s ongoing commitment to higher education, although the academic successes of the sons of Weili Dai and Sehat Sutardja might be an even better reflection of that commitment.

Chris Rowen is Founder and CTO of Tensilica, an IP company based in Silicon Valley. We spoke last week by phone to discuss how an IP company decides what and when to introduce new products.

I first asked to Chris for a brief history of the RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computing] architecture he is closely associated with, and how that history segued into the founding of Tensilica.

**************************

From RISC to Tensilica …

Q: Can you give me a quick overview of the origins of RISC architecture?

Chris Rowen: RISC is a set of ideas that grew up in academia and IBM in response to increased architectures in both the mainframe and microprocessor worlds.

People saw machines with really high hardware costs being built for assembly [language applications]. However, as compiler technology got better, people said: If I want a compiler to run well, I don’t need fancy instructions. I only need a common set of instructions that run really fast. All other complex operations could be composed by the compiler out of these fast, simple operations.

RISC grew out of these compiler technology advances, and a recognition in the VLSI era that there was an opportunity to rethink the process of how the architecture could be put together. IBM’s John Cocke is mainly associated with these concepts, but similar ideas were emerging at the same time at Stanford with John Hennessy and at U.C. Berkeley with Dave Patterson.

They were all saying: Let’s try leveraging VLSI technology to improve how we design systems. Academics, in particular, realized universities could make important contributions here, and they quickly were showed dramatic results by developing microprocessors 5-to-10 times faster than anything currently in the market.

In 1984, John Hennessy pulled together a group at Stanford, including folks from Bell Labs and IBM, and other bright industry veterans coming from a number of places in the Valley. I was lucky to be part of the group that formed MIPS Computer Systems in September of that year, ironically to commercialize the Stanford MIPS Chip. We quickly decided, however, to move to a clean sheet of paper and define an entirely new chip.

MIPS has gone through a range of different business models since that time, starting in the chip business, moving into systems, and then on into microprocessor design. As MIPS’ products became wildly popular, the company was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1992, and then spun out again in 1998.

Interestingly, because of the Silicon Graphics acquisition, MIPS became a pioneer in microprocessor licensing focusing primarily in designing for high-end devices. From 1994 to 1996, however, as ARM really got up and running, Silicon Graphics was largely absent from the processor licensing business. ARM, meanwhile, established itself as a leader in that space and executed well.

If MIPS had done something different, if we could roll back the tape and start again, the world would look very different today.

Q: Your Tensilica strategy emerged out of your MIPS experience?

Chris Rowen: Yes. In 1996, when I returned from working with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, I decided to join Synopsys to run their Design Reuse group. They started in the USB and PCI interface logic area, but we tried to think much bigger.

It was clear that the centerpiece to IP-based design was always going to be the microprocessor; every chip will have a processors. It was going to be a very highly leveraged item for application-specific chip design.

We also recognized that the impact of Moore’s Law would be ever greater integration, and ever greater integration would mean ever greater specialization of the chip. Chips would look more and more like systems as they got bigger. I could see there were plenty of general purpose chips, but I thought there would be a market for more application-specific products.

Once I saw that, I knew there were big opportunities for these types of microprocessors. Nobody was doing it at the IP level, it was such a difficult technical problem. You had to work through all of the general questions of delivery, but also needed to narrow the application. I decided we needed to pursue broadly specific processors to attach a wide range of problems within a specific area.

Clearly to do so, we needed to solve the problem of getting good models cheaply while still maintaining a 5-to-10x improvement in efficiency. These results would outpace anything you could achieve through improved synthesis, faster transistors, better routers, or any other innovations within the silicon design world. And this was the motivation for Tensilica.

What we deliver is not the same as a general processor. We’re not competing head-on with MIPS or ARM, but are delivering application-specific processors. We’re meeting an increasing demand for good programmable and application-oriented architecture.

Q: How do you decide which application domains to go after?

Chris Rowen: That’s actually the beauty of the IP business model: If you make a chip, you take all of your [poker] chips and put them on one number. You must guarantee the one chip penetrates the market. With application specific IP, however, you don’t need to be so narrowly specialized. You’re only going to make pennies, or a dime at most, per customer’s chip that you’re involved with, so you are betting on a much wider set of numbers on the market.

In order to leverage all of that, we decided that instead of building application-specific cores, we would create tools that take high-level specifications and create customized processor RTL instantaneously, with high optimization and specialization. We also create the complete matching software tool chain. We therefore enable lots of different silicon designers to have the design of their dreams.

As Tensilica has matured, we’ve also discovered that design teams come in lots of different flavors. Some teams know exactly what application they want to do, which others only have general guidelines with respect to their goals.

For these types of customers, we have developed domains where we have a lot of in-house system knowledge. We can use our own generator for applications in audio, multimedia, baseband, and other areas. We generate processors in these various sectors, which in turn provide solutions and a starting point for many of our customers.

Q: In essence then, you’re providing design services?

Chris Rowen: No, not at all, because that implies having a team of engineers, interviewing the customer, getting specifications, and using a lot of sweat to deliver the specific thing the customer wants. We may go deep with a customer into the problem at hand, but we are not doing the design.

We’re relying instead on the automation we provide our customer for access to processor generation. We provide a set of software tools which generate standard products, not standard services, with a concentration on 3G, 4G, broadband, audio or video processors. True, we have a significant collection of cores that are already designed that can be further configured as needed by our customers. We establish the theme and the software base the customer then builds on.

A lot of people are not just looking for a processor they can program, they’re also looking for a collection of software and processors that work together nicely. We’re providing that, at a higher level of software and application-specific knowledge built into the processor.

Q: How do you decide what areas of specialization to concentrate on within Tensilica?

Chris Rowen: In every market, there are sub-markets, some of which are quite lucrative. Deciding which market or sub-market to pursue is a consequence of having this remarkable processor generator – our secret sauce for being nimble – and as a result, we are able to pursue emerging markets at a much faster rate than other IP providers.

Q: How do people know to come to Tensilica to meet their needs?

Chris Rowen: That’s a question at the core of our position as a corporation. Currently we have nearly two billion processors out there, so people have definitely heard of us. They’ve heard of our platform for automatic processor generation.

In markets where people are not as familiar with us, however, there are lots of design services providers who do know of us, as well as a rich community of system architects who continue to expect us to help them solve their problems. That’s our best opportunity to become known to their customers.

Of course, there are also people who have worked with us while at one company, who take their knowledge of Tensilica with them when they move onto another employer. They know we can provide a platform that’s far more flexible than what is traditionally expected in a hardware sense.

Q: How do you know when to expand beyond your existing expertise, versus a more conservative stance of sticking to your knitting?

Chris Rowen: That’s an excellent question. Naturally, we wouldn’t want to try to enter 10 new markets at the same time, even if we do have the appropriate technology. At the same time, there are some very clear lines that tell us it’s a good time to develop a new vertical application. We look at a number of criteria.

Number 1: We look for a domain which is a computationally hard problem where people need to do high throughput, or high performance, or high performance per watt, or high performance per dollar.

Number 2: There is a growing reason to move to a more programmable solution. In many of the markets where there are great opportunities, people have previously used hard-wired solutions but now seeing increased complexities in standards, be it video, audio, or baseband.

The customers in those cases say next time they will not go with a hard-wired solution, it’s too long of a design cycle and produces too many bugs. In that case, there is a compelling reason for them to go with something programmable, something that Tensilica can provide.

Number 3: Does this new technology sector fit into a larger market – the stuff of classic Marketing 101. Particularly as you only make pennies or dimes per unit, it’s important to justify the investment. We look at any market where there are lots of chips being designed,

Number 4: Is there a large customer base? What are our big customers doing? Are there other opportunities on a chip that’s already in production, but is now being revised by a new department within an existing customer? Every design we are involved with is a potential for expansion into other adjacent functions. We are always looking at those types of opportunities.

That combination of watching our customers, and watching high volume products in the market, is what convinces us it’s time to move into a new sector. Being nimble technically is built into our DNA, so when we see opportunities we’re able to react.

Do we have the knowledge in-house already, or is it readily available? And, a market we’re familiar with will outweigh a market we’re not as familiar with, and that’s often part of the debate we undertake before moving forward.

We also look at the risks: How certain can we be sure of a successful development? It may be an exciting trend in the industry, but are we able to embrace that trend?

And, how strong are the alternative solutions that already exist? Often the inertia of a pre-existing methodology already in place with the customer will win over a newer solution. Do we have the sales channels, and a technology that’s sufficiently superior to beat the inertia of the in-house solution.

We have to make a judgment call in considering that sort of competition and decide if we can beat it. As I said, the decision to move forward is only made after a very lively debate.